(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace

Basil Chiasson

1. Introduction

This essay argues for a re-thinking of the descriptive phrase “comedy of menace” as it relates to Harold Pinter’s work and that critical uses of the phrase and understandings of its dramatic articulations need to be expanded. By revisiting and clarifying first menace and then comedy, sundering the two terms only for purposes of review and interrogation, I hope to demonstrate how comedy and menace are necessarily bound up, and are thus mutually empowering. The general sentiment is that Pinter’s earliest plays can be characterized as comedies of menace and, moreover, his later and more precisely political plays break with that aesthetic or tradition. To the contrary, in this essay, I argue that the comedy of menace aesthetic is dramatically crucial to the later political plays as well, albeit they have undergone a transmutation in the way of content, form, and effect. Despite and in fact because of such a transmutation, certain family resemblances between Pinter’s earliest and more recent plays come forth, inviting a re-imagining of Pinter’s “original” comedy of menace, and suggesting that this term can be stretched over the playwright’s entire oeuvre. To utter the phrase comedy of menace is, for many, tantamount to saying Harold Pinter’s name. However, one of the several ways in which the conflation of Pinter’s name and comedy of menace can appear as ironic is that Pinter did not coin the phrase, nor was he the first playwright with whom it was associated.1 The phrase and its corresponding dramatic aesthetic derives from David Campton’s 1958 play The Lunatic View, whose subtitle characterized the play as A Comedy of Menace. Yet, despite comedy of menace being Campton’s “birthright,” it was theater reviewer Irving Wardle who linked the phrase to Pinter in his glowing appraisal of the author’s 1958 play The Birthday Party. 32 Basil Chiasson From the article, itself entitled “Comedy of Menace,” here is Wardle’s most quoted description of Pinter’s aesthetic formulation:

Destiny handled in this way -- not as an austere exercise in classicism, but as an incurable disease which one forgets about most of the time and whose lethal reminders may take the form of a joke --is an apt dramatic motif for an age of conditioned behavior in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction. (33)

In portraying not Campton but Pinter as the bellwether of this emergent theatrical aesthetic, Wardle began to fashion Campton’s subtitle into a concept and a critical tool, which represents one of the more significant contributions to Pinter scholarship. It would seem, however, that Wardle’s assertion that Pinter delivers all things menacing in joke form gives short shrift to Pinter’s aestheticization of comedy. Wardle inspired a way of speaking about Pinter’s work that would have lasting consequences. For it was he who set the stage for Pinter criticism to routinely attend more to the menace than to the comedy, often discussing the two as if they were wholly separable. Walter Kerr suggested as much when nine years later he insisted that “‘Menacing’ is the adjective most often used to describe the events in a Pinter play” (14).

2. On Menace

Pinter himself once insisted that “Menace is everywhere. There is plenty of menace in this very room, at this very moment, you know. You can’t avoid it; you can’t get away from it” (qtd in Sakellaridou 1999, 97). Culling from myriad descriptions of what constitutes “menace,” I offer the following modest overview of how it figures in Pinter’s work. What is often referred to as “the infamous Pinter pause” (Batty 19) is the obvious and indeed best point of departure for any discussion of the elements commonly thought to represent, engender, or perpetrate menace in Pinter’s plays. Although its function throughout the playwright’s oeuvre is by no means uniform, the Pinter pause is typically analyzed on the basis of its dramatic virtues, which is to say that as a device it orients us to the performative character of speech more so than to the characters’ (and the author’s) desire or capacity to convey information.2 The Pinter pause’s lack of lexical content is precisely what makes the device inextricable from and